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Wine Comes Full Circle at Arbor Crest

© Eve Carr

The mystique of wine and its romantic allure always intrigued Kristina Mielke-van Löben Sels as she was growing up in San Rafael, California. Little did she realize that her childhood interest in wine would develop into a career -- and, indirectly, be responsible for her falling in love with a wine grower.

"My mother and father both loved wine, and it was sort of a ritual at dinner," she says. "I thought it was kind of a fancy thing to do."

Her father also enjoyed collecting wine and took the time to help her understand and appreciate it with a few sips here and there. Then, when she was 12, her parents hired a winemaker and opened Arbor Crest Wine Cellars, in Spokane, Washington. Now Kristina's interest in wine flourished. During the summers between school, she started developing the purple-stained hands of a winemaker as she began bottling wine, as well as helping pick peaches, raspberries and strawberries from her family's fruit fields.

When it was time to think about college and a subsequent career, she faced a tough choice. In addition to her fondness for wine, she also loved animals, so she enrolled at University of California at Davis, which had excellent programs in both fields.

"I started a few classes to become a vet, but then had an accident with my cat and realized I wasn’t very good with blood," she says. "That made me decide that I was just going to love animals, and not going to worry about trying to take care of them.”

After thoroughly enjoying the basic enology viticulture class at Davis -- and finding out that her vet chemistry courses would, indeed, transfer to the enology course -- she made the switch and graduated in 1993 with a Bachelor of Science in fermentation. To gain experience in the field, she worked for the Robert Mondavi Winery and then at Ferrari-Carano Vineyards in Sonoma County.

While at Davis, Kristina did more than learn about how to make wine. Through her brother, an agricultural student, she met Jim van Löben Sels, who had also grown up around wines and winemaking. In the 1970's, his family had numerous vineyards at Oakville in Napa, California, and were quite well known for making wonderful innovative wines. So with their similar childhood vineyard backgrounds, Jim's vineyard and agricultural economics experience and Kristina's winemaking expertise, their marriage in 1996 was destined to produce their own fine wines someday.